We were awakened soon after midnight by the stopping of the steamer.  Then a gun.  After awhile another; and presently a third:  but there was no reply, though our coming had been telegraphed from England; and for nearly six hours we lay in the heart of the most important French arsenal, with all our mails and passengers waiting to get ashore; and nobody deigning to notice us.  True, we could do no harm there:  but our delay, and other things which happened, were proofs--and I was told not uncommon ones—­of that carelessness, unreadiness, and general indiscipline of French arrangements, which has helped to bring about, since then, an utter ruin.

As the day dawned through fog, we went on deck to find the ship lying inside a long breakwater bristling with cannon, which looked formidable enough:  but the whole thing, I was told, was useless against modern artillery and ironclads:  and there was more than one jest on board as to the possibility of running the Channel Squadron across, and smashing Cherbourg in a single night, unless the French learnt to keep a better look-out in time of war than they did in time of peace.

Just inside us lay two or three ironclads; strong and ugly:  untidy, too, to a degree shocking to English eyes.  All sorts of odds and ends were hanging over the side, and about the rigging; the yards were not properly squared, and so forth; till—­as old sailors would say—­the ships had no more decency about them than so many collier-brigs.

Beyond them were arsenals, docks, fortifications, of which of course we could not judge; and backing all, a cliff, some two hundred feet high, much quarried for building-stone.  An ugly place it is to look at; and, I should think, an ugly place to get into, with the wind anywhere between N.W. and N.E.; an artificial and expensive luxury, built originally as a mere menace to England, in days when France, which has had too long a moral mission to right some one, thought of fighting us, who only wished to live in peace with our neighbours.  Alas! alas!  ‘Tu l’a voulu, George Dandin.’  She has fought at last:  but not us.

Out of Cherbourg we steamed again, sulky enough; for the delay would cause us to get home on the Sunday evening instead of the Sunday morning; and ran northward for the Needles.  With what joy we saw at last the white wall of the island glooming dim ahead.  With what joy we first discerned that huge outline of a visage on Freshwater Cliff, so well known to sailors, which, as the eye catches it in one direction, is a ridiculous caricature; in another, really noble, and even beautiful.  With what joy did we round the old Needles, and run past Hurst Castle; and with what shivering, too.  For the wind, though dead south, came to us as a continental wind, harsh and keen from off the frozen land of France, and chilled us to the very marrow all the way up to Southampton.